Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Tag: spending money

The Obama administration’s attacks on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce look a lot like a three-day story on its final day. The national media had its doubts, and even Democratic operatives decried the gambit.

Why did the administration go after the Chamber? The politics are not hard to figure out. Earlier actions of the Obama administration mobilized the Republican base. At the same time, the President and his party have been losing the support of independents for a year or so. Their only hope of limiting the electoral damage was to rally the Democratic base, who are discouraged and divided.

The Democratic base might agree about what they don’t like and fear: business, money in politics, and foreigners — or at least, foreigners spending money on politics. The attack on the Chamber of Commerce appealed to all three. The administration hoped that fear would engender hatred and hatred would bring people to the polls to vote against business and the GOP.

The most surprising part of the attack was the rather naked appeal to anti-foreign bias (see Bryan Caplan’s discussion of this concept here). Most people think of Democrats as friendly to undocumented foreign workers. But Democrats are first of all egalitarians; for them, the whole point of politics is to help the oppressed and harm the oppressor. They do not favor undocumented foreigners because they believe people have a right to free exchange, borders notwithstanding. Instead, Democrats see undocumented foreigners as victims of oppression by American businesses. Foreigners who have enough money to spend on elections are oppressors in the egalitarian mind.

Obama promised hope and change. He and his party now want to maintain — so far as possible — the political status quo (that is, their control of Congress). To do that they are trying to prompt fear and hatred among their most loyal voters. The new motto of the administration appears to be: fear and stasis.

Of course, the administration had no evidence the charges were true and argued that the Chamber should be seen as guilty until proven innocent. All in all, the whole affair suggests desperation and a complete loss of constraint in pursuing a political end. It suggests, I think, conduct that used to be covered by the word “Nixonian.”

Speaking recently a Steamboat Institute conference, I explain that big government is America’s fiscal challenge, not whether the spending is financed with taxes or borrowing.

This issue is important because the statists are trying to create the conditions for a big tax hike. We got huge spending increases under Bush, and now Obama has picked up the baton and is racing in the same direction. Needless to say, the politicians don’t care about deficits when they are spending money. But when it is time to discuss tax policy, deficits suddenly become a giant threat to the economy and turning more of our money over to the political class is the only solution.

The Q&A session also is interesting, as I pontificate about the financial crisis, Keynesian economics, the rule of law, and tax competition(both videos courtesy of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity).

There’s lots of outrage in the blogosphere over revelations that some of the biggest recipients of the federal government’s $700 billion TARP bailout have been spending money on lobbyists. Good point. It’s bad enough to have our tax money taken and given to banks whose mistakes should have caused them to fail. It’s adding insult to injury when they use our money – or some “other” money; money is fungible – to lobby our representatives in Congress, perhaps for even more money.

Get taxpayers’ money, hire lobbyists, get more taxpayers’ money. Nice work if you can get it.

But the outrage about the banks’ lobbying is a bit late. As far back as 1985, Cato published a book, Destroying Democracy: How Government Funds Partisan Politics, that exposed how billions of taxpayers’ dollars were used to subsidize organizations with a political agenda, mostly groups that lobbied and organized for bigger government and more spending. The book led off with this quotation from Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.”

The book noted that the National Council of Senior Citizens had received more than $150 million in taxpayers’ money in four years. A more recent report estimated that AARP had received over a billion dollars in taxpayer funding. Both groups, of course, lobby incessantly for more spending on Social Security and Medicare. The Heritage Foundation reported in 1995, “Each year, the American taxpayers provide more than $39 billion in grants to organizations which may use the money to advance their political agendas.”

Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for the very lobbying that seeks to suck more dollars out of the taxpayers. But then, taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize banks, car companies, senior citizen groups, environmentalist lobbies, labor unions, or other private organizations in the first place.